Salzman Lecture, October 27, 2002
Journeys Towards Global Citizenship: Ethics of Poverty and Development.
Katherine Marshall
Thank you for the honor of inviting me to speak this evening. It is a rare privilege to be able to step back and reflect on the currents of a life and work, together with so dedicated and so committed a group. I know you will challenge me and hope that we will learn together from our encounter.
Journeys and the Complexity Conundrum
My story tonight takes the form of an interwoven set of journeys. I highlight images that linger in my mind in movements from place to place. Some are my own journeys, some those of others, some very real, and some rather metaphoric. It seemed especially apt to me, as I approached this meeting, that in the World Bank, where I have spent most of my working life, a journey is termed a mission – in the sense that it has a purpose beyond the journey itself, yet is defined by end, a middle and a beginning. It ties person, team, and institution together with in a complex web of reasons and ends. I think of T.S. Eliot in reflecting on this set of journeys: when I have traveled I often find that “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time”. I have ten journeys to recount, each touching on a part of my story about poverty, development, and their ethical dimensions.
Another theme weaves through this voyage, inspired by what I can describe as a lifelong preoccupation with the challenge of communication – how important yet how difficult it is. A good writing teacher advised a structure that begins with “the problem”, turns to “the complication”, then concludes with “the solution”. I have tried to follow that, roughly, with the added sense that complication is part of the problem. I have a deep appreciation solidified over the years that nothing is as simple as it looks and a deep respect that, for important reasons, others see things differently than I do. That flies often in the face of an imperative of our times, this fast paced sound byte era, that one must, simply must, reduce conviction and realities to phrases that can be understood instantly and that will grab attention. I impress on young staff members that their message must come in a first paragraph or it will not be heard. As a frightening introduction, did you know that research shows that messages to listeners come in three ways: words, facial expression and body language? And the proportions are 7%, 23% and 70% respectively?
Perhaps even worse, how often is a message misunderstood and how firmly does that misunderstanding stick and last? This picture offers an illustration:
It is a classic optical illusion, is used by many in teaching about communication. What do each of you see? To shortcut, some see an old woman, some a young woman, because they are both in the picture. What is most interesting to me is first how some see one or the other with clarity and conviction, second that once one sees one of the images it is difficult to perceive the other, and third, in discussions, how vehemently people can stick to one image or the other. I want to convey to you my sense of how urgent it is today to work towards a dialogue that goes beyond such frozen images, that has a compass which points direction but which reflects the value and need to take different paths and respects the very different views and convictions of most of our fellow man.
Each of my journeys – the stories – are thus colored by a central concern and conundrum we face: the challenge of communicating ideas that are truly complex even as they are simple, that have multiple layers and many facets: a multitude of pieces in the rich kaleidoscope.
And I am disobeying my own general counsel tonight – no sound byte message up front, as we have here the opportunity to travel the journey of development work together, with at least a bit more time than usual for reflection.
Journey 1: Washington DC to Ibadan
My first journey is by way of introducing myself, and it covers two points in my passage from childhood to a lifelong passion to work in development. At one end is a rambling house on Macomb Street in Washington, and well along the way a mission hospital in Ibadan. This journey has a kaleidoscopic quality, turning time past and into time present (my childhood blurring with my children’s). It starts with memories of a complex but fairly protected and privileged childhood, with Halloween parades, the wonder of books, sledding down the hills, daily school challenges, and sleepovers with friends. But my family lived an abrupt change when I was 13, when my father changed career and moved to Ibadan, Nigeria. I was marked in many ways by that jolting move to Ibadan, a huge city that is engraved in my memory with its smoky smells and hazy horizon, abundant sounds of life and highlife music, and bustling market where, I was told, you could buy ANYTHING (including a human skin).
I found myself once (when I was doing research there) enlisted suddenly to help in a hospital yard where hundreds of people were crowded, critically ill, during a cholera epidemic. Everyone who was available was brought in to change IV tubes and clean the mess, as hundreds of people lay on beds that were nothing more than plywood planks with a hole cut in them. A city that seemed vibrant and alive became something very different. A doctor made two off hand comments that marked me: first, that cholera was not a real danger to me because it was a disease of poverty and second, that there was a special problem with the scene, because there were too few women, children, and old people: they were simply dying at home. I was gripped then, and have never forgotten, the problem: the horror of the epidemic and the deep poverty it revealed and my own helplessness as a clumsy helper in the face of so much palpable and visible suffering. I had a great desire to help, but a dawning sense of how hard it was, how complex. There was the immediate problem but much more that lay behind it. That moment took me closer to work that aimed tackle the hidden, deeper problems as well as those I could see and touch. This drew me, in time, to the World Bank, in a “line operational” position that took me to a succession of country issues where we worked to address the immediate problems before us while looking deeper and deeper into the complex of problems beyond, of culture, history, institutions and human foibles.
Journey 2: Lambeth Palace to Canterbury
My second journey covers a short distance, in space, but a long (and particularly significant) one in other respects. It begins at Lambeth Palace, London, in February 1998, and leads to Canterbury Cathedral, in October 2002 (earlier this month). At Lambeth, a lovely old Palace on the Thames River, where a gnarled ancient rambling fig tree still grows, that was giving fruit when King Henry the VIII moved to change England’s relations between church and state, a meeting five years ago started an intellectual and policy journey that has brought two very removed and different worlds closer together. The worlds are those of religion and faith, and of international development. Jim Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, and George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury, with a personal initiative that has engaged them both, deeply and personally, invited a group of leaders from the major world religions to meet there. It was a tentative and exploratory meeting, which was rather strained. It grew partly out of disagreements and tensions: many faith leaders were critical of the World Bank, especially what was termed structural adjustment, and concern about the weight of debt was growing. World Bank officials were frankly baffled and frustrated at the much of the criticism. They also were forced by the erratic and unsatisfactory encounters to recognize how far apart their world was – little organized cooperation and knowledge over 50 years of development history and vocabularies that seemed from different planets But the meeting also sprang from a deep sense that these worlds should be joined in a common purpose in the fight against poverty.
What started at Lambeth was an effort at dialogue between the two worlds. It is grounded in a deeply felt common purpose: the World Bank has articulated its mission in two ways: “our dream is a world free of poverty” and “to fight poverty with passion and professionalism”. Every major world religion has as a central anchor in of compassion for those who suffer, a deep obligation of the fortunate to help those in need, and a fire for social justice. Beyond these two starting points for both worlds, though, lie worlds of complications – in how the World Bank and other institutions view and fight poverty, and in how religions also explain it and exhort us to respond. But the core is there: this is a central problem for us all. The dialogue also built on three other strong areas of common concern. The first was deep engagement in social services (with a growing recognition of how large a role churches and other faith institutions play in many areas beginning with schools and hospitals), the second a recognition that faith institutions had a special “ear” for voices of the poor because they are so present in poor communities and are trusted by poor people, and the third a strong common concern for building peace – both preventing conflict and rebuilding when as it comes to an end.
The next part of the journey from Lambeth had many boulders, ravines, and other complications. The idea of dialogue, seemingly straightforward and sensible, drew sharp criticism, mainly from the development actors. Why? Most important was the political dimension that many saw in religion – with two particular areas, one the rise of fundamentalist movements and the tensions around them, and the other the often controversial stance of religious institutions in the international arena, especially where women’s reproductive health rights were at issue. The clash here seems to have ricocheted far into other areas and fostered disproportionate unease at listening to experience and ideas from faith institutions. It took some years of exploration to understand the concerns, to move, at an international level, towards addressing the real challenges of respecting the hard won separation of church and state, and also to define better what dialogue meant – not debate, not explanation, not just words, but a real effort to understand and find better ways to work in partnership. Hopefully, though, a World Faiths Development Dialogue (WFDD) in the form of a modest but important institution is now well launched.
A second important marker along the path was September 11. This brought the links between religion and development into much sharper and much more complicated relief. No one could really argue thereafter that a better understanding of religions was not vital, but the sensitivities appeared greater still than ever before and the list of questions much longer: Was religion changing? In what direction? Was it conducive to peace and stability or against it? Did religion favor a dialogue or a clash of civilizations? The World Faiths Development Dialogue (and I had joined the effort in early 2000), was confronted directly and immediately with these questions.
The meeting in Canterbury early this month returned to all these questions but with a much more ambitious frame. It was looking to a real partnership that would bind development and faith institutions in a global agenda. It built on a global consensus on what are termed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). World leaders, joined in the United Nations, took stock in the year 2000, as we all did, of the many initiatives and promises that they had made in preceding decades. They concluded that the world community was not doing enough to address the problems of global poverty, and the projections of what lay ahead were both frightening and unacceptable: billions already living in miserable conditions and many more likely to be added to their numbers. Again in dramatic contrast, we also know that today we have the resources and we have the know-how to change that situation.
The September 2000 Millennium Declaration by world leaders proclaimed: “We will spare no effort to free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty, to which more than a billion of them are currently subjected.” The Millennium Development Goals reflect a new determination to mobilize energy, resources and passion behind tangible, quantified formulations of imperatives that have been spoken about and agreed for generations. 2015 – not far before us all – is a date when we are committed to judge how well we have done in defeating the ancient scourges of want, ignorance, hunger and strife. The goals are straightforward – halve poverty, halt the spread of communicable diseases, ensure that all children go to school and at least finish primary school, work to protect and improve the environment. Global leaders and institutions (like the World Bank) are committed to judging their performance against these goals, as are nations and their leaders.
The Canterbury meeting achieved two important results: the significance of these “covenants” and agreements was underscored time and time again, and there a determination to do more to translate the ideals and target into practice.
The journey from Lambeth to Canterbury has transformed those who traveled this path in countless ways. To give just a few examples of the insights that have come from the dialogue, the world of development has put some holes in two ancient and engrained notions, that to me are dangerous myths. The first is the tendency to romanticize poor communities, past and present: societies where most people are illiterate, where up to 40% of children die before they are 5 and most people would be termed malnourished (the lot of most people over history) are far from sound. Second, we have lived long with a fatalistic sense that poverty is inevitable – “the poor they shall always be with us”. This is not necessary and not acceptable today as a belief, because we have the knowledge and we have the resources to alleviate the worst of the world’s misery. It is a challenge to us all of will, priority and organization. The religious participants in turn are helping to transform development thinking with constant reminders that people do not live or think in sectoral silos, that all problems and issues are linked, that life and change are about much more than money, and that the “whys” and “hows” of action are at least as important as the “what” and “how much”.
Journey 3: Rio to Palermo
The third journey leads from Rio de Janeiro to Palermo, Italy, and it is in essence an exploration of the growing and complex world of interfaith organization. There are two specific points, the first the August 2002 Global Assembly of the United Religions Initiative (URI), and the other the annual assembly of the Community of Sant’Egidio, a remarkable Catholic lay organization, in early September. Both were meetings dedicated to world peace, and built on the conviction expressed best by Hans Kung: there can be no peace without peace between religions, and there can be no peace between religions without dialogue between religions. Both meetings were large gatherings of sincere committed people, and drew on the symbolism, belief and pageantry of religious traditions in their effort to bind people and communities more closely together and dramatize their commitment to world peace. The two meetings also revealed dramatic differences in approach (a complication indeed).
The URI meeting in Rio reflected that organization’s belief in a decentralized, grass roots, open, and eclectic approach to interfaith dialogue, as well as an American origin. The meeting was a celebration of diversity and difference, hard to capture in single messages but bringing home the reality that world peace starts at the level of each person and community and their images of others and ability to communicate across cultural barriers.
The meeting in Palermo fit more within ancient traditions of world faiths and their hierarchies and customs. It was a brilliant display of intellectual force and pageantry, and it built on a philosophy that the path to interfaith dialogue began with a deepening of one’s individual faith. At the meeting’s conclusion, each faith group worshipped separately, then moved (in a torchlit procession) to the central square, the “rivers” of people meeting at intersections with embraces and handshakes. The religious leaders sat in groups – marked by the red for cardinals, black of the orthodox leaders, white for Abuno Paulos, orange for Hindu and Buddhist, and other blocks. There were almost no women and the dialogue here took place in private. Together, on the stage, the leaders lit candles for peace and placed a proclamation for peace in the hands first of immigrants to Sicily, then children, to be passed to the diplomatic corps sitting in the front row.